As individuals grow increasingly more nomadic, the occurrence for individuals to relocate themselves has become more commonplace. Furniture suppliers and manufacturers have embraced this trend by offering economical flat-pack or knock-down furniture. These types of furniture make the task of moving home furnishings easier verses traditionally constructed furniture.
Flat-pack and Knock-down furniture is designed to be sold in a disassembled form and later assembled at a location where the furniture will ultimately be used. This design element naturally makes for easier transport of the furniture in many circumstances. In general, flat-pack furniture tends to be limited to one assembly over the life of the furniture, and thus is difficult if not impossible to disassemble and reassemble at a later point in time. In contrast, knock-down furniture tends to be designed for multiple assemblies and disassemblies over the life of the furniture, which often makes knock-down furniture particularly desirable to consumers who frequently change residences, such as college students and apartment dwellers.
In some cases, another useful feature of knock-down furniture is adaptability. This feature allows for the furniture to not only be easy to transport, but also have the ability to adapt to the confines of a new environment.
A common problem for a number of different knock-down furniture designs results from failure in the fastening hardware components used to maintain the knock-down furniture in an assembled state. Many times cheap hardware is supplied with the furniture, leading to premature failure of the furniture or difficulty in repairing or replacing the hardware. Also, in some instances a consumer will lose or discard customized tools that are provided with the knock-down furniture after the furniture has been assembled, so the tools are no longer available when it is desired to disassemble and/or reassemble the furniture potentially months or years in the future. These problems are compounded when there are different types of fastening hardware components used in a particular design.
Thus, a need continues to exist in the art for knock-down furniture that has the ability to be assembled and disassembled without sacrificing quality, comfort, and/or appearance.